 At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg Mark Wallender may not be a Kentucky native, but he has certainly allowed it to become his home. After a long and accomplished career in the legal profession, Wallender now volunteers his time at the David School where he offers his support and experience to the students who attend. We caught up with Wallender recently to speak with him and find out more about his life of service to his community. So my background started out basically as a young Ken Clee when I got a low draft number, went into military in 1971, stayed for about seven and a half years, and then when I got out of the military, I had the GI Bill. I went in, got my undergraduate degree, and then got a law degree, and then I stayed at the State of the Public Defender's Office for a couple years, and then got hired by the FBI as a special agent, and that was in 1984. In 1990, I resigned. I ran a narcotics strike force up in Lake County, Ohio for almost a year before I came down here to Kentucky. I got hired in the Lexington office, the United States Attorney's Office in 1990, and they needed somebody to come out here to cover the federal docket out here, so for about ten years I came out here every other week and tried cases with Judge Joseph Hood, who was the federal judge out here at the time, and then in 2007 I had 30 and a half years of federal service, and I retired and went on to a second career and do a lot of civil work, a lot of criminal defense work on the federal appointment list, and then about three weeks ago, October 11th of this year, I hit the 50th anniversary of the day I showed up for basic training, and I told my wife, I think 50 years, that's enough, I'm done, I'm closed in the office. But I come out here because I love it. I really do. Every week I come out here for at least two days, sometimes three days a week. I stay at the cabins and do projects around the campus, do a little teaching, and anything else that a handyman can do at my age. While volunteering at the campus is given while under a host of different projects to work on, for him, his work at the David School is more about simply being there to help the students however he can. The big thing is, is reaching kids. I mean, I can tell you right now that I had one person in my life that reached me when I was growing up. I grew up poor. I grew up in a neighborhood where I always said that there were two ways he came out of it. You either got drafted or you went to prison. I got lucky. I got drafted and then went down and volunteered. So yeah, I love kids. And if I can pass on and say even one kid by being out here and talking to him, and let him talk to me, giving him an ear, it's a great way to live. I get a lot of kids that are very interested in the fact that I was an FBI agent, and I tell them all the time that, you know, even though I grew up poor and had no education and had no, you know, I had really no, nobody to really help me in that direction. I tell everybody here, dream a dream and you can do it. One of the projects that he has undertaken however is designed to help students not only learn valuable skills, but also to help the school support itself a bit more financially if successful. We have ten cabins here on the campus down towards the entrance of it, and they've kind of fallen a little bit into disrepair. So over the summer months, I spent the summer months power washing the cabin outside and then repainting the deck, and I'm getting ready to start and putting new fans and new light fixtures and painting them all and putting in some new faucets and so forth. And so we're hoping that in the spring, when the tourist season starts out here, we'll have eight of those cabins that will be available for the kids to operate as an Airbnb. So it will not only generate a stream of income for the school, which could be anywhere between $70,000 and $80,000 for the six-month period, but also give the kids an opportunity to learn a skill in hospitality because this is one of the premier places for tourism in the country that very few people even realize it's here. With all that he has done and is currently doing, Wallander says there have been many memorable moments throughout his life. However, the time he is now spending in service to the David community is just as valuable to him as any of his past experiences have been. I think every moment's a favorite moment. I hate to say that, but I come out here, my wife gets tickled because on Wednesday morning when I load up the car, she says, oh, you got that smile back on your face. And I said, yeah, because I'm going out and it's a beautiful place. So now, I mean, I don't know a favorite moment. I just think every moment out here is special and you can learn something from every moment. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joshua Slung.